The Door to My Household: The Phenomenon of Decorated Doors in Middle Egypt

The Door to My Household is a catalogue and the first part of a monograph that presents a series featuring dozens of unique wooden doors from the Middle Egypt region. These doors were crafted by several carpentry families over a period of at least a hundred years, from the 19th to the late 20th century. These unusual objects are decorated with reliefs depicting floral motifs, humans as well as animals. Both the style of representation and the symbolism of these motifs seem to date back to Pharaonic times. They refer to the essential and eternal role of the door as a passage between two worlds - the outside world and the inside world of the home. Doors decorated this way are no longer manufactured; the tradition died out with the last craftsman. Moreover, many of the doors presented on the pages of this book no longer exist. The intensive construction activity of our time has destroyed many of the old buildings and with them these extraordinary doors. The authors have succeeded in capturing literally the last moment in the existence of this craft tradition, which is unusual for other parts of Egypt.